@@include("_includes/header.html", {"title": "MailNoter"})
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="content">
    <section>
        <h2>MailNoter</h2>

        <p>MailNoter is a small tool to help gathering notes from various
        applications, but specifically from browsers.</p>
        <p>There are many tools and applications out there which help to
        keep a repository of personal notes, and even though some of them
        are very good at what they do, they all either use a proprietary
        format to store the notes (what would happen to my notes if the
        application isn't supported anymore and stops working on future OS
        versions?), only store notes as plain text, require non WYSIWYG
        input (e.g., Wikis), don't allow attachments, don't work if
        there's no network access, or are just plain ugly.</p>
        So I'm keeping my notes in my email account:
        <ul>
            <li>open storage format</li>
            <li>available from different computers and OS</li>
            <li>works offline</li>
            <li>usable with any email client</li>
            <li>usable through a web browser (no need to install anything if I'm at a place where I can't just install apps)</li>
            <li>easily searchable (either through the web interface (did I mention I'm using Gmail?)), through desktop search engines or the email client itself</li>
        </ul>
        And with Gmail, I can add tags to my notes very easily, which
        makes searching them even easier.
        <p>So how does MailNoter help here? (Please don't complain about
        the name: I had to choose something that isn't used by some
        other application, and "MailNoter" returned exactly two hits in
        Google: both because of a typo).</p>
        Without MailNoter, if I want to create a note from a part of
        a website or code snipped in the IDE, I had to:
        <ol class="ordered-list">
            <li>create a new mail</li>
            <li>go back to the browser/IDE/whateverApplication</li>
            <li>select the part I want to keep as a note</li>
            <li>hit Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard</li>
            <li>go back to the new email I started</li>
            <li>paste the text in</li>
            <li>enter a meaningful subject for the email</li>
            <li>enter the "To:" address</li>
            <li>hit "Send"</li>
        </ol>
        with MailNoter however:
        <ol class="ordered-list">
            <li>select the text in the browser/IDE/whateverApplication</li>
            <li>hit the hotkey (e.g., Win+PrintScreen)</li>
            <li>hit "Send"</li>
        </ol>
        MailNoter, when the hotkey is pressed, automatically copies the
        selected text into a new email, fills in the "To:" address and
        also fills in the email subject automatically. No need to manually
        copy/paste, create new email, fill in the same stuff over and over again.
        <p>Another nice feature of MailNoter: selecting files in Explorer
        and hitting the hotkey will create a new email, with the selected
        files already added as an attachment. Image files are not added as
        an attachment though, they're added inline.</p>
        <p>So, as I said: it's a small tool which doesn't do much. But
        it helps me with gathering my notes.</p>
        <p>You can get it from the <a href="https://code.google.com/p/mailnoter/downloads/list">download page</a>.</p>
    </section>



    <section>
        <h3 id="setup">Setup</h3>
        <p>After downloading MailNoter, unzip the executable file. After
        a doubleclick, you will see a new icon in the system tray.
        A right-click on that icon shows a context menu:</p>

        <img src="/img/mailnoter/contextmenu.png" alt="Context menu" width="134" height="82">

        <p>A click on the "options" entry brings up the configuration dialog:</p>

        <a class="fancybox" data-fancybox-group="gallery" href="/img/mailnoter/optionsDialog.png" title="Options dialog">
            <img src="/img/mailnoter/optionsDialog-small.png" alt="Options dialog" width="148" height="89">
        </a>

        <p>Here you can set the hotkey, the "from" address (most email clients
        will ignore that, so you can leave that empty) and of course the
        "To:" address. You should enter here your own email address.
        Hint: some email providers allow you to add custom parts to your
        address, for example <em>myemailaddress+notes@example.com</em>.
        The part after the <em>+</em> is then ignored, but you can use that
        to set up a filter to automatically move mails arriving at that
        address to a "notes" folder in your email account.</p>
        <p>You can also set here that MailNoter automatically starts when
        you log in to your workstation.</p>
        <p>You can also modify the look of the "appendix" which is added
        automatically for html content, which by default is a one row
        table containing the source URL.</p>
    </section>

    <section>
        <h3 id="client">Email client</h3>
        <p>For MailNoter to work, you must have an email client installed
        which supports <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Application_Programming_Interface">Simple MAPI</a>.
        Most email clients support that, but you might have to set your
        email client as the "default" email client first.</p>
        <p>Also, MAPI was created before HTML mails existed, so there is
        no way to tell an email client that it should use HTML mails. To
        avoid the email client use plain text instead of HTML mails, you
        have to configure your client to create HTML mails by default, not
        text mails. But that's the default for most email clients anyway.</p>
    </section>

    <section>
        <h3 id="capture">Capture content</h3>
        <p>After you've set everything up and MailNoter is running, you
        can start capturing content. For example, go to a website with your
        preferred browser, select an interesting part of the page, hit the
        hotkey and see MailNoter open a new email for you with your
        default email client:</p>
        <a class="fancybox" data-fancybox-group="gallery" href="/img/mailnoter/capturingWeb.png" title="Capturing the web">
            <img src="/img/mailnoter/capturingWeb-small.png" alt="Capturing the web" width="257" height="193">
        </a>
        <p>To report problems, please use the
        <a href="https://code.google.com/p/mailnoter/issues/list">issue tracker</a>.</p>
    </section>
</div>
</div>
@@include("_includes/footer.html")
